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"Evidence...proves that
prohibition only drives drunkenness behind doors and into dark places, and does not cure
it or even diminish it."---Mark Twain, 1867
Prohibitionists
Write Federal Alcohol Report
By Steven Milloy,
A federal panel on underage drinking recently called for higher taxes on alcoholic
beverages to reduce alcohol consumption by minors.
While
this recommendation may seem reasonable at first glance, its unlikely to work.
Moreover, its part of an ongoing effort by neo-prohibitionists to reduce alcohol
consumption in general.
A panel of the National Academy of Sciences Institute of
Medicine recommended in its Sep. 9 report "Reducing Underage Drinking: A Collective Responsibility
that Congress and state legislatures should raise excise tax rates on alcohol,
particularly on beer, supposedly the alcoholic beverage that most young people prefer.
Alcohol is much cheaper today, after adjusting for
inflation, than it was 30 to 40 years ago... Increasing the cost of alcohol has
well-documented deterrent effects on underage drinkers, the IOM panel asserts.
But the panels claim is lame, from both a research and
common sense perspective.
The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholisms
10th Special Report, issued in June, 2000,
cites plenty of research reporting no effect of higher beer taxes on college and student
drinking.
Even if some IOM panel members were somehow ignorant of the
NIAAA report, at least one panel member, Philip J. Cook of Duke University, has no excuse.
Dr. Cook wrote in 1999 that, the scholarly consensus on the public-health benefits
of alcohol excise taxes appears to have broken down in recent years.
Estimates of the influence of beer excise taxes on
drinking, heavy drinking and motor-vehicle fatality rates are not robust
and the true
effects may be considerably smaller than suggested in the previous literature, added
Dr. Cook.
That underage drinkers arent terribly responsive to excise
taxes (or even really price) shouldnt be news to anyone. Underage drinkers
dont drink because they can afford it; they drink what they can afford.
The IOM panels recommendation is further undercut by its
own acknowledgement that most underage drinkers get their alcohol directly or
indirectly from adults.
How is an excise tax going to affect underage drinkers if
theyre not buying it in the first place?
Excise taxes, in reality, would probably only impact adult
consumers, perhaps causing some to their reduce purchases of alcoholic beverages-- the
real goal of the neo-prohibitionists.
Nine of the 12 experts on the IOM panel have ties to
anti-alcohol activists, according to the Center for Consumer Freedom.
Eight of the 12 have ties to the prohibitionist Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
Between 1988-2002, RWJF gave more than $260 million to
anti-alcohol causes. Over $60 million went to something called the Consider Fighting
Back program, a goal of which is to achieve measurable reduction in the
overall use or demand for alcohol.
Heres a brief run-down of some of the IOM panel members
Marilyn Aguirre-Molina is a former RWJF senior program officer
and current RWJF consultant who accused alcohol companies in 1990 of killing us
softly.
Judy Cushing is the CEO of the RWJF-funded Oregon Partnership,
which has run ads linking beer with heroin and other illegal drugs.
Panel chairman Richard J. Bonnie, previously chaired an
RWJF-funded Committee.
Joel Grube is director of the Prevention Research Center at the
anti-alcohol RWJF-funded Pacific Institute on Research & Evaluation.
So the IOM panel was seriously biased and its conclusions were
likely determined before it began work. The panels recommendations are nothing more
than RWJF prohibitionism dressed up in IOM clothing.
Perhaps worst of all, the IOM panel paid scant attention to
efforts that may actually reduce underage drinking.
Social norms is a relatively new approach to
addressing risky behaviors. It has been successfully tested on selected college campuses
to reduce alcohol use and abuse by students.
Social norms theory predicts that individuals overestimate the
degree to which peers have permissive attitudes or behavior with respect to alcohol use,
smoking and other risky behavior and underestimate the extent to which peers engage in
health, health-promoting or risk-reducing behavior.
Educating students on what are the norms for behavior actually
can lead to reductions in risky behavior. Social norms programs at Northern Illinois
University, the University of Arizona, Western Washington University, Hobart College and
William Smith College have led to significant reductions in problem drinking.
The IOM panel dismissed the social norms approach as not having
enough supporting data -- a problem the panel strangely didnt seem to have with
raising beer excise taxes even though the latter approach has been seriously questioned,
if not discredited.
But I suspect that the panels real problem with the social
norms approach is that simply reducing underage drinking doesnt accomplish the
panels real goal -- halting the publics consumption of alcoholic
beverages.
Steven Milloy is the publisher of JunkScience.com,
an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute and the author of Junk Science Judo: Self-defense Against Health Scares and
Scams (Cato Institute, 2001).
"A government that is big enough
to give you all you want is big enough to take it all away."---Barry Goldwater